Home

Approaching Stockholm

I'm home in Cape Town. I once read someone's account of the disruption of place that modern travel creates. Often within short periods of time you can be transported from one city to another on the other side of the world without the necessary time to process both your leaving and arriving. I feel this acutely. It feels like one minute I was in green, silent, warm Uppsala, the next I'm in the bustle and hustle of Cape Town, no longer on my bike, but in my car instead. But there is also a very strange familiarity about everything. Yes I do fit in, yes it all feels, smells and tastes of something I know very intimately. Yet, part of me is also in that other place I just left and I find myself opening draws, cupboards expecting to find the things that should be inhabiting that space, except in Uppsala. Before returning to Cape Town, I read the beautifully captured experiences of the notion of Home, by Salman Rushdie. This in-between world of the immigrate at home and a stranger at the same time, in both their country of origin and their new host country.

But I settle and each day brings a new discomfort and new soothing, calm as I accept my 'new' surroundings.

I feel the sharpness of being all alone again in my home, and the togetherness, familiar sounds and accents of all the talking and catching-up with friends and family. I worry that the deep feelings of surety and contentment I experienced in Uppsala will be withered away as I have to start doing the things, that set me on the sabbatical path in the first place. Already I've had shaky starts that have left my mind racing ahead and unable to stop until the early hours of the morning. But all things settle and I now know I have a good foundation, a solid layer to offset the doubts and conflicting thoughts. Sure they will come, but I also know they will leave again - given time, they always leave, pass along.

walking, thinking and writing

And not to forget talking to one's self. Before embarking on a writing task, and certainly all the way through the activity, my head is usually full of ideas and thoughts and I'm frequently in conversation with myself. There is often the misperception that writing is merely a pyschomotor skill. You sit down at your desk, in front of your computer and 'write'. For me I can't disconnect or untangle thinking from writing. I have to think about my writing before I write. Ordering my thoughts, ideas, argument. I always remember saying to my students, that when writing an essay you have to also allocate time for thinking. For processing your thoughts and working out how to deal with the essay question and all the readings and discussions about the readings. Thinking is as important to essay writing, as writing the essay.

my walking route, just outside the Stefan's flat

For me, walking alone can act as a trigger to stimulate my thinking, especially when I'm at the start or smack in the middle of a writing task. I don't know what it is about walking that takes me, almost automatically, to this space, but it does. I'm lucky at the moment, that I can take walks whenever I want and that I can walk in the most calming and serene settings. I haven't always had this luxury. My self-talk is probably most active when I'm out on a walk. I often wonder if the people passing me, might think that I'm 'not all-there' as I openly talk silently to myself - mouthing words, posing questions, gesturing and tracing words in the air. What do I care - this is all part of the process for me, and at the moment I'm very grateful I can experience it in its fullest expression.

fika in Sweden

This morning I said goodbye to my Uppsala University colleagues at the Division for Teaching and Learning. We had a fika. A slightly special, goodbye fika, but nonetheless very typically of what fika means in Sweden. Coffee and informal conversation.

This goodbye fika signals that my 'formal' time at Uppsala University has come to an end, and I'm on the 'home stretch'. Each day I get closer to the end of my sabbatical. But currently, I'm not thinking too much of my return to 'work'. I'm in a very good space - so far  the sabbatical has done what it was intended to do: Give me the chance to clear my head, try and focus on what I want to do next and of course, write, write and write. 

don't forget the peripherals

Writing peripherals. And I'm not referring simply to the multiple pens (as many different colours as you can source), pencils and miscellaneous stationery needed as part of the writing task to be completed. I'm thinking more of all the supporting processes and tasks that go alongside but are essential to completing an academic writing project. Like that pesky reference list that is never completed until, two hours before you are meant to submit the manuscript. And when it is finally compiled, it is often riddled with errors or omissions. Or organising all your data files and smaller analysis tasks into a single folder that can be readily accessible irrespective where in the world you might be writing the research.

On Friday I spent all of the morning working on the reference list for my in-progress paper. Yep - a whole morning. I'm an academic, a scholarly writer, not a freaking administrator I kept mumbling under my breath, as I realised how disorganised and incomplete my reference repository is. I'm a print-person - I love paper, so I could find the hard copies of most of my references but when I tried to compile the reference list electronically...well, all was not well on this side of Uppsala. As a PhD student, I had diligently spent most Friday's on this mundane, administrative activity. Sorting out my reference repository, and 'cleaning' up all my data and research related files. It paid off when I had to construct and produce that huge thesis document. But it would seem I've lost sight of the valuable lessons learnt. I'm thinking some of my sabbatical time should be devoted to 'cleaning-up' and organising my articles and updating my Mendeley repository. I might even set aside some time to  refine my cite-and-write skills - yes, I'm a late adopter and still not 100% convinced it the best/most practical way to produce a reference list. But I guess writers have to be good administrators too.

making meaning of 'sabbatical'

I've been in Sweden for a month and I'm starting to wonder more seriously about what it means to be on sabbatical. As part of my leave application I had to list all the expected outcomes for this period. They were all written artefacts - publications in accredited journals, editorial activities for the edited collection I'm working on. All writing tasks. So it would seem my sabbatical is all about writing. But what about just reading (anything), just thinking, just walking, just doing 'stuff' I wouldnt normally do back at my desk, in Cape Town? How do these activities fit into my sabbatical plan?

I've been writing, making slow, but I would also say, stead progress on that highly prized 'journal publication'. Most mornings I get up around 7 and I'm at my desk at Blåsenhus or the sunny dinning-room table at the flat by around 9:30am. I have that same anxiety and then guilt that I had for much of my PhD about not writing enough, not writing fast enough, not doing more. On Thursday a colleague back home said to me jokingly, when I mentioned I had a hard, long day, 'Are you working? Aren't you on sabbatical?' Made me think! In no time I will have been here for two, three months and all I will have to show are those written (incomplete?) artefacts. My neck and shoulders will still be rock-hard and sore, my body will continue to be stiff and inflexible, the sadness, worry and displacement I've been feeling for months before arriving in Uppsala will still be warmly nestled in my being.  I will also berate myself for my inability to calmly respond to the workplace stress that will surely greet me on my return.

So what is this sabbatical about then? Yes it's about writing - it's about finding the joy, and not only fixating on the terror, and weight of writing. But it's mostly about me, Lynn, the academic writer, the academic and teacher. It's about valuing and accepting how I am as an academic writer, how I write academically, what kind of academic writing I do and why I write the 'stuff' I do. It's also about me, Lynn. Just me, Lynn.